Antonin Scalia, appointed under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, was the first Italian American to serve in the US supreme court. He died on 13 February.
Photograph: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Antonin Scalia, a supreme court justice who has died aged 79, relished his position as a bulwark resisting the social changes sweeping America over a generation.

The former law professor was fiercely and flamboyantly conservative on “culture wars” issues from abortion and gay marriage to gun laws and capital punishment. He believed the constitution should be a fixed point in a changing world. It made him a bete noire of liberals and progressives and a sitting target for satirists such as Jon Stewart.

Nicknamed “Nino”, the devout Catholic was proud to be the first Italian American on the supreme court. He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and built a reputation as one of America’s most influential and quick-witted conservative jurists.

Scalia once described his victories in the supreme court as “damn few” yet they did include a pivotal moment in history. He was in the supreme court’s majority in the 2000 Bush v Gore decision, which effectively handed the presidential election to Republican George W Bush. Whenever the subject arose at public functions, his response was characteristically blunt: “Get over it.”

In another notable success, in a 2008 case he authored the majority opinion when the court ruled 5-4 that the constitution’s second amendment right to bear arms extended to an individual right to keep guns in the home. It marked a major defeat for gun control activists.

He angered liberals again by helping effectively strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a 5-4 vote, freeing nine states to change their election laws without advance federal approval. He had described it as a form of “racial entitlement”.

When things did not go his way, Scalia was known for his colourful and angry dissents, often read with theatrical flair in the courtroom. A New Yorker article once commented that of all the members of the supreme court, “Scalia is most likely to offer the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar onstage”.

When the court legalised same-sex marriage last June in a 5-4 vote, Scalia, who was in the minority, took aim at Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion and the liberals who joined him, saying he would “hide my head in a bag” if his own name were associated with that decision. He opined: “The supreme court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” adding that the opinion was “couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic”.

That same month his dissent on a ruling that affirmed Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms dismissed the majority opinion as “pure applesauce” and “jiggery-pokery”. Scalia was subsequently lampooned in a cartoon segment of Stewart’s The Daily Show titled “The Human Dissentipede.”

Scalia was a champion of originalism, which he later called textualism: the approach to constitutional interpretation that looks to the meaning of words and concepts as they were understood by America’s founding fathers in the context of the 18th century. When interpreting statutes, Scalia insisted the justices should look at the actual words and bypass congressional reports, floor speeches and other artifacts of legislative history.

This, he argued, made many issues of the day simple to resolve. He told the American Enterprise Institute in 2012: “The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.”

He wrote for the court when in 1989 it allowed states to use capital punishment for killers who were 16 or 17 when they committed their crimes. He was on the losing side in 2005 when the court changed course and declared it unconstitutional for states to execute killers that young.

In one of his most heartfelt arguments, Scalia said the right to an abortion never appears in the constitution, and the supreme court’s historic 1973 Roe v Wade decision that created a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion was wrongly decided.

In a 1992 dissent, Scalia explained his stance on abortion. “The constitution says absolutely nothing about it and the long-standing American traditions of American society have permitted (abortion) to be legally proscribed.”

In 1996, he vigorously dissented in the court’s ruling that the all-male Virginia Military Institute must admit women or give up its state funding. Scalia wrote: “It is precisely VMI’s attachment to such old-fashioned concepts as manly honor that has made it, and the system it represents, the target of those who today succeed in abolishing public single-sex education.”

Scalia, who had a son who became a priest, used a 1996 speech in Mississippi to urge Christians to stand up for their religious beliefs. “We must pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.”

He was in the majority when the court ruled in 2014 that privately held corporations could mount religious objections to a provision of Obama’s healthcare law that required employers to provide health insurance that included contraception coverage.

On the law, he took special pride in sixth amendment cases he helped develop that changed sentencing rules and that involved the right of defendants to be confronted by the witnesses against them. When it came to the first amendment, he once commented: “I do not like scruffy people who burn the American flag,” but “regrettably, the first amendment gives them the right to do that”.

Scalia, an only child, was born in Trenton, New Jersey,

on 11 March 1936, and grew up in Queens, New York. His Sicilian-born father was a professor at Brooklyn College and his mother taught public school.

Scalia graduated from Harvard Law School with honours in 1960. Three years earlier, he had graduated first in his class from Georgetown University.

He spent eight years in private law practice in Cleveland and then joined the faculty at the University of Virginia Law School. In the 1970s, he served as general counsel of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy under President Richard Nixon.

Scalia was a law professor at the University of Chicago before Reagan named him to the US court of appeals in Washington in 1982, and then four years later appointed him to the highest court in the land.

A smoker of cigarettes and pipes, Scalia enjoyed baseball, poker, hunting and the piano. He was an enthusiastic singer at court Christmas parties and other musical gatherings. He was held in deep affection by his ideological opposites on the supreme court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.